Two weeks ago my friend Juli and I got together to work on a quilt for her DIL's baby shower in March. Juli had found some nursery rhyme fabric at a thrift store and wanted that to be the focus fabric. She sews well, but has never pieced or quilted.

I messed up her focus blocks by cutting them the wrong size and so the adventure began. She came today with her blocks - very disappointed - because the pink 9 patches were more visible than the nursery blocks. We arranged and rearranged and I think fixed the problem. Using the nursery rhyme for part of the borders helped - the supply of this fabric was very limited. So ... enjoy our fun day and what I think turned out to be a beautiful quilt top. Next time she comes we'll sandwich and I'll start her on machine quilting. This is the blind leading the blind as I know only a bubble more than she does, but ... we're having fun!

When we first started it two weeks ago I had her add sashing around the nursery blocks to get them up to the 8 inch size the pattern she had called for - and we carefully arranged them so the same characters weren't too close together then planned where the yellow and pink sashings would go to offset the gingham 9 patches. THAT'S the arrangement that was too pink to her - the top row was pink/focus/pink/focus/pink and the next row was focus/yellow/focus/yellow/focus. SOOOO I had her start with her focus - and put the ginghams diagonally - and that helped, but now none of the sashing is next to the gingham it was planned to be next to so those colors make no sense. Our Official Quilty Opinion about that was WHATEVER and we went ahead anyway. I told her that was my main lesson for her - WHATEVER! Do the best you can then let go of the rest.